‘Game Of Thrones’ Shifts Season 7 Debut Officially; Out Of 2017 Emmy Race

Game Of Thrones‘ executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have been saying for a while that the next season of the HBO blockbuster would consist of fewer episodes than usual and that it would likely opened later. Today we officially learned that those episodes are going to be airing a couple of months later with a summer 2017 premiere of the seven-episode season and that will have an Emmy effect.

The Emmy winning show based on George R.R. Martin’s novels commonly starts its seasons in April of every year so a shift to a summer 2017 launch will see GoT out of the running for TV Academy voters next year. HBO confirm today the shift will leave the annual TV ceremony GoTless next year. To be eligible a show must run between June 1 and May 31, according to Primetime Emmy rules. Having won Best Drama last year, GoT received 23 Emmy Award nominations this year. No doubt this will come up when GoT makes its annual Hall H appearance at Comic-Con later this week but for now the only word is corporate.

“Now that winter has arrived on Game Of Thrones, executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss felt that the storylines of the next season would be better served by starting production a little later than usual, when the weather is changing,” said Casey Bloys, president, HBO programming today. “Instead of the show’s traditional spring debut, we’re moving the debut to summer to accommodate the shooting schedule.”

Also, the seven episode run of Season 7 is a drop from the 10-episodes that the series has usually run each season. Additionally, the EPs have said that they think GoT will wrap up with Season 8 – which is also expected to be shortened.